5 ms·
It took me a while to understand your comment, until I realized there are two interpretations of the question of where these numbers come from: • One is a hist
by svat 4y ago
It took me a while to understand your comment, until I realized there are two interpretations of the question of where these numbers come from:
• One is a historical question: who first used these numbers and when? who copied from where?
• The other is a conceptual question: why might someone choose these numbers, what do they "mean", how do we interpret these constants?
The former is purely a question of facts and there is nothing to "explain the nature of the numbers", and this is what the answerer on Stack Exchange seems to have interpreted it as. Under this interpretation saying things like "the modulus is the period" is not really germane to the question; what's required is to search sources and try to find the chronologically earliest one. (The answer doesn't seem to have done a definitive job, but it's a reasonable start.)
This is like synchronic vs diachronic in linguistics: in the latter interpretation you mainly just want to understand the random-number generator.
- jefftk 4y agoReading the question it seems pretty clear to me they're interested primarily in the history: "Who invented this algorithm and tested the distribution? Is there a paper or something to cite?"
- svat 4y agoYes that's what I thought too (which is why I found the complaint hard to understand until I thought of the alternative interpretation). But clearly at least the person I was replying to understood it differently, and it was also the top comment on this thread for a while at the time I posted my comment, so others may have thought the same too. Even at the question, on a comment on the answer the asker mentions "why these numbers are special" and comments about them being prime etc, so it's possible they didn't have a clear idea what they wanted either.